the pecuniary prizes of their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was
indeed a trying business, preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness which
they and everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to
poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conduct which the
law of self-preservation compelled men to break. Looking on the inhuman
spectacle of society, these worthy men bitterly bemoaned the depravity of human
nature; as if angelic nature would not have been debauched in such a devil's
school! Ah, my friends, believe me, it is not now in this happy age that
humanity is proving the divinity within it. It was rather in those evil days
when not even the fight for life with one another, the struggle for mere
existence, in which mercy was folly, could wholly banish generosity and kindness
from the earth.
    It is not hard to understand the desperation with which men and women, who
under other conditions would have been full of gentleness and ruth, fought and
tore each other in the scramble for gold, when we realize what it meant to miss
it, what poverty was in that day. For the body it was hunger and thirst, torment
by heat and frost, in sickness neglect, in health unremitting toil; for the
moral nature it meant oppression, contempt, and the patient endurance of
indignity, brutish associations from infancy, the loss of all the innocence of
childhood, the grace of womanhood, the dignity of manhood; for the mind it meant
the death of ignorance, the torpor of all those faculties which distinguish us
from brutes, the reduction of life to a round of bodily functions.
    Ah, my friends, if such a fate as this were offered you and your children as
the only alternative of success in the accumulation of wealth, how long do you
fancy would you be in sinking to the moral level of your ancestors?
    Some two or three centuries ago an act of barbarity was committed in India,
which, though the number of lives destroyed was but a few score, was attended by
such peculiar horrors that its memory is likely to be perpetual. A number of
English prisoners were shut up in a room containing not enough air to supply
one-tenth their number. The unfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in
service, but, as the agonies of suffocation began to take hold on them, they
forgot all else, and became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for
himself, and against all others, to force a way to one of the small apertures of
the prison at which alone it was possible